The Old Town Ale House

On North Avenue in Old Town, a corner tavern has been open since 1958, and the walls have been getting stranger ever since. The Old Town Ale House is a neighbourhood bar in the truest sense — no food worth the name, no television, no cocktail list — and it is decorated with dozens of hand-painted portraits of politicians, celebrities and regulars, rendered with a satire that has been a local legend for decades. It is the sort of room where a writer can sit for an afternoon, where the Second City cast has always ended up after the show, and where the beer is cheap, cold and served without ceremony. Anthony Bourdain came for Parts Unknown and recognised it instantly as the kind of place that keeps a city honest.

The order is simple: a beer, and then another. There is nothing else on the agenda, and the bar prefers it that way. The portraits are the entertainment — the longer you look, the more you notice — and the jukebox is real, which is to say it is a machine with opinions. Sit at the bar, not at a table, and talk to the person beside you, because that is what the room is designed for.

It opens in the morning and closes late, so it serves both the people who are starting their day and the ones who are ending it. Bring cash, leave the laptop at home, and do not ask for a menu you would not get.

What Bourdain loved about places like this is that they are unrepeatable. The Ale House cannot be franchised or copied, because its value is entirely in the accumulated years and the people who made them. Come for a beer, stay for two, and look at the walls — an eccentric, unironic portrait of a city that has always been prouder of its neighbourhoods than of its skyline.